Zayd Depaor's Symbolic Photography: My expansion into Photography

Primarily, I am known as an artist and filmmaker (although in other circles I am primarily known as a researcher & writer, which has taken a back seat in recent years). My art has led me to an interest in photography as I have had to photograph my sketches & paintings and I photograph the locations of my sketches. My filmmaking has led to an interest in photography due to the tradition of submitting 'production stills' to film festivals along with entered films and due to cinematography itself being an extension of photography. Due to my artistic style of film, I have gradually developed an interest for creating artistic photography, reflective photography, symbolic photography.

Anyone familiar with my filmmaking methods will know it is extra low budget, cheap consumer cameras etc. I am now carrying that same trend through to my artistic photography, showing that beautiful compositions & images can be captured with extra cheap equipment.

So what do I know about photography? Well there is Wikipedia isn't there! Well I don't know much, I have a book on digitial photography and that is about it, plus all my camera manuals. Knowledge about anything in this age is seeming less relevant and appealing from an elitism point of view. I have a house which is like a library, hundreds of books on many topics I regard to be important, but then there is google, free books for download, wikipedia, youtube etc. So in this time everyone can pretend they know something while they argue on internet forums, copying and pasting and treating all expertise like fast food, on demand TV. Everyone is a scholar of every subject as you only need a net connection. Sorry, that was a diversion.

My approach to photography at the moment is, '...if I like the way it looks, its good enough...' I don't have an DSLR camera, I don't even have a bridge camera yet, but I have a decent compact and bunch of consumer camcorders that can also take stills. I am more interested in shot composition and impression of subject matter than technicalities and the science of photography, partly because I don't possess much of that.

I will experiment with my various cameras, varying natural and artificial light, varying zoom, various subjects that interest me, angles, framing and composition and gradually I will try to understand more technically what I am doing. If I can understand how to turn the camera on and where the shutter button is then I am doing well.

If this is your first contact with Zayd Depaor, then you might like to check out some of my more familiar outpourings:-

My Art & Film blogs (where I talk to myself):-

http://depaor-art.blogspot.com

http://zayd-depaor-films.blogspot.com/

Websites containing my art (and about 100,000 other people's):-

http://www.art-3000.com/artist/zayd_depaor/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zayd_depaor/

http://www.artbreak.com/zayd_depaor

http://www.picassomio.com/zayd-depaor/exhibition.html

http://www.paintingsilove.com/artist/zayddepaor

http://zayd-depaor.deviantart.com/

http://artfellas.com/profile/depaor